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In defense of coding interviews

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Re: In defense of coding interviews

#201

Post by Jensson »

amitport wrote: post #198
Jensson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always this "if you have any complaints about Scrum then you aren't doing it correctly" with no explanation how you'd fix the problems I talked about. Also the leetcode interview is cargo-culted from big tech companies like Google and Scrum is cargo-culted from big tech consultants. They don't fit well together, having both means your company just picked the most popular/simple way to do each part without considering…

Scrum does not mean "no freedom" or "no autonomy" it just says lets think about what we're going to do and try to follow a plan for the next week or two. Of course the individual software developer should be the one responsible to forming, adapting, and updating this plan (and it definitely should contain " collaborate with stakeholders, build prototypes and get feedback etc,") (of course, there is some level of 'com…

Sanity check: Would your manager complain if you stopped doing Scrum? If yes then you don't got that much freedom. If no, then I can see it being fine. It can work fine if nobody outside of it depends or uses the Scrum process, but then the company isn't doing Scrum, just the team doing it internally. This lets the team adapt and stop doing Scrum when it no longer fits their problem etc, that is the agile way. My point was just that if a company uses both the leetcode interview and the tightly integrated Scrum process mandated on teams then that doesn't make sense.

Edit: And a job ad where they say you should be well versed in Scrum I take it as they will force Scrum on me regardless if it makes sense or not, because I doubt a team just doing Scrum for themselves would put that in a job ad. Companies loves putting this in their job ads though so it is very easy to spot which companies works like this.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#202

Post by beebeepka »

koonsolo wrote: post #184
implmentor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I would love to share some: I relate strongly to the anxiety induced descriptions in OPs text and thus try to avoid these when I interview devs as an engineering manager. Of all the candidates I have interviewed over the years I have never done a live coding interview because it is essentially worthless for me as an interviewer and only serves to discards potentially very clever people whose thought proce…

So how do you know they did it on their own? Spouse is a developer, helps them out, explains everything. Then on the job there is no spouse, and it all goes to shit. Not saying this would be every time, but you might come across one of these. We have an initial Hacker Rank 'filter', that if you don't pass that, we don't even do an interview. A few weeks ago we interviewed someone who passed that filter very well. But…

I think this person has a better idea because your spouse scenario, while realistic, can easily be detected while you discuss the code being presented.

You may have good intentions but what do you equates to "I don't trust you, bro/sis". Not a great way to start a relationship imho

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#203

Post by higeorge13 »

lordnacho wrote: post #143
andreygrehov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken, Google has a paper on this, in which there is a statistical confirmation of coding interviews being a predictor of success.

Did they hire people who failed their interviews in order to see how well they did?

That would be an amazing ab testing for hiring. And they are among the 100 companies who could easily do it.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#205

Post by enedil »

arethuza wrote: post #162
vkou wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't give me the o(n) performance of the algorithm that you just wrote, this is a pretty serious red flag about your ability to understand what you are writing.

What would you do if a candidate said with a smile "I'm pretty sure it is O(n!)"?

Parent commenter asked for little o, not for big O. So to be safe, better say n^o(n^2).

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#206

Post by lapcat »

ownagefool wrote: post #173
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

The false negative is the obvious downside of the coding interview, but I wouldn't say that it means there's no merit to the excercise. Take for example the "can't define an array" crowd. Are there people virtually sitting in front of me who just forget the basic syntax? Absolutly, but given we a) tell them that correct syntax isn't dreafully important, and b) let them pick the language, a [] would probably suffice,…

> The false negative is the obvious downside of the coding interview, but I wouldn't say that it means there's no merit to the excercise.

Tell that to the people who are always the false negative.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#207

Post by Nextgrid »

I think in-person coding interviews (so both sides have skin in the game) are good but the problems should actually be applicable to the task at hand. In practice, this is rarely the case - I'm not sure if it's because there's a shortage of non-algorithm-focused questions or if because every bullshit startup wants to come across as some super advanced software R&D operation while what they ultimately need is a variant of CRUD.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#208

Post by koonsolo »

beebeepka wrote: post #202
koonsolo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you know they did it on their own? Spouse is a developer, helps them out, explains everything. Then on the job there is no spouse, and it all goes to shit. Not saying this would be every time, but you might come across one of these. We have an initial Hacker Rank 'filter', that if you don't pass that, we don't even do an interview. A few weeks ago we interviewed someone who passed that filter very well. But…

I think this person has a better idea because your spouse scenario, while realistic, can easily be detected while you discuss the code being presented. You may have good intentions but what do you equates to "I don't trust you, bro/sis". Not a great way to start a relationship imho

> can easily be detected while you discuss the code being presented.

That is possible of course. But if they wrote the code together, and know they will question later, you could teach the other person all the trade-offs etc. I could see myself doing that with a bad developer and get them through such an interview.

> Not a great way to start a relationship imho

Well, you could take the benefit of the doubt, and then when it seems they did cheat, just fire them. But firing is always such a big decision.

It's a difficult problem.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#209

Post by motogpjimbo »

vletal wrote: post #160
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

I've just interviewed for Google and Meta. In total I went through 8 individual coding interviews. With an exception of one, which was a bit too much like a puzzle, I think the assignments were completely fair examples of what I might experience on daily basis. Not at all tailored to people doing competition style programming, which was what I expected after being exposed to HN for years. I have to say I enjoyed both…

If you have to prepare for the interview, doesn't that suggest the assessment isn't representative of day-to-day programming skills? In fact, it suggests the exact opposite.

With zero preparation, I could go to an interview with you right now and tell you anything you wanted to know about designing a database schema, how to get any kind of data out of that schema, how to make that data available via an API, how to cache the data and perform permissions checks, how to deploy code to a cloud environment, how to set up a build pipeline, or any other question you might want to ask about the day-to-day process of developing and deploying web applications. I can answer those questions because I already work in the industry and I broadly know what I'm doing.

However, I probably couldn't pass a FAANG interview without months of prep work, precisely because whiteboard interviews bear almost no resemblance to the reality of software development.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#210

Post by nowherebeen »

Jensson wrote: post #177
nowherebeen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reread a) and b) from another perspective because never did I say they were lying to themselves.

I agree with b) and c). A is a bit forced though as tobacco companies faked studies to show that what they sell is healthy even though they knew it was horribly bad for you, I don't see how Google is anything like that with respect to hiring processes. If they talked about ads or search then the likeness would make sense, but I don't see it for hiring. But I agree that Google is different than most companies. There t…

> But I agree that Google is different than most companies. There the main thing is ads and search and infrastructure to run both of those.

One of the Marques Brownlee videos mentions that when he met Eric Schmidt, Schmidt mentions that every problem Google have were scaling. If you look at it from his perspective, it would make a lot of sense why algo is so important for Google interviews. He applied it not only in tech, but with hiring as well.

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